


Legacy

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon compliant till His Last Vow, Grief, Had the last five minutes of Season 3 never happened, Multi, Watson family life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-03
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 14:23:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2071632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I loved him,” John says, eventually, because he needs to say it. “But I married you. And if I had to choose, if I ever have to choose, over again, I will choose you. I would always have chosen you.”</p>
<p>“You should never have had to,” says Mary, and John does not let himself agree.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legacy

John goes back to Baker Street, after. It’s one of the things he’s promised himself, promised Mary, promised his therapist whose number is still saved to his phone on speed dial, although he’ll be damned if he ever calls her again, even for this. He won’t hide from the things he’s lost and gained back and lost again, not this time. Once was enough. Once was bad enough.

And, anyway, he still owes Mrs Hudson a spot of tea.

They have it, and a plate of Jammie Dodgers, in the front room of Mrs Hudson’s apartment. She apologizes for the dust in the hallway and the smell of paint in the air and the unavailability of 221B’s soft, comfortable couch, with a sad smile and a placatory dish of extra chocolate cake.

“I’m having contractors in, love,” she says, with a twist to her mouth that tells John what she’s really saying. “They’re putting up new wallpaper today.”

“Better dig out the bullets, first,” John agrees, nodding, sipping his tea, because it would do no good to anyone to blame her for the things she cannot change.

Mrs Hudson sighs, into her tea, which is brewed with the sort of perfection John never could emulate and Sherlock never tried to. He’d always made the tea with military precision and efficiency, but that hadn’t ever stopped him from scalding the tea leaves or pouring in too much milk or putting in too little sugar. He’s missed Mrs Hudson’s tea. He’s missed a lot of things.

“You know I can’t bear it, John,” says Mrs Hudson, helplessly. “But all I’m an old woman, all I’ve got is this house. I can’t work like I used to and there’s all these bills to be paid, the shopping to do, you know how it is.”

“I do,” says John, soothingly, and he does. He does, and he doesn’t blame her, not one bit, and he hates it all. He doesn’t ask about Mycroft, or about the enormous cheque he’d sent her in the mail to have her keep the apartment open, unoccupied, the last time this had happened. Of course, it hadn’t happened quite like this, the last time. This time, apparently, there will be no coming back.

He asks, instead, about Sherlock’s things, about his case files and his books and his science equipment and his violin. He pats her hand and tells her he’ll help with the packing, this time, because it’s an unfair load to place on her shoulders, it had been then and it still is now. He tells her he’ll clear them before the next tenant comes.

He puts the boxes in the back of his car, that day, as he leaves.

Mary comes out to the front of the house before he even has the chance to get out of the car, and Mary helps him carry the boxes inside, cardboard balanced expertly against the swell of her stomach. Mary helps him, over the next few weeks, to shelve books and pack away glass vials and find somewhere appropriate to put the violin, and when John brings a pair of armchairs into their living room which is too clean and tastefully decorated for them to ever fit, Mary lifts them over the rug and smiles, watery, and says nothing.

John doesn’t suggest they move into 221B, out of sentiment or to keep Mrs Hudson company or to cling onto the shadow of something taken too soon and returned too briefly, but it’s a close thing. He doesn’t suggest it because he’s afraid Mary will agree.

They live with their ghosts, the two of them, but they shouldn’t want to.

***

John wakes, sometimes, in the middle of the night. He takes a little while to figure out why he does it. He’d done it, before, waking to the horrible silence of a too-beige flat with cold sweat pouring down his back in tracks like rain, like tears, woken by the absence of noise, by the lack of scraping on violin strings at two in the morning or clinking of beakers at three or quick, muffled explosions, but he’d grown used to the silences in the years between then and now, that loss and this. Domestic life had suited him, just as Sherlock had said, and he’d learned, slowly, to fall asleep to the quiet hum of the air-conditioner or the electric blanket, to drown his nightmares in Mary’s soft sleeping sighs in the bed beside him instead of Sherlock’s mad insomniac footfalls on the carpet below.

He lays awake four nights in a row, and wonders, and on night number five he gets out of bed with a small chuckle at the voice of his ex-flatmate telling him, again, that he’s completely and utterly thick.

He follows the soft nighttime sounds, the kind of noise he used to consider a sort of lullaby and now finds foreign, alien, an unnatural growth on the soft quiet form of the night, and finds Mary in the living room. She’s sitting on the floor, under the window, and the moonlight through the window turns her blond hair silver-white. She’s holding a black case in her lap, long and coffin-like, fingers trailing on the glossy wood of the violin.

She has tears running down her cheeks.

He goes to her and wraps his arms around her, from behind, and it seems impossible that she with her assassin’s senses and her wife’s knowledge of his steps could have not noticed him walking up to her, however quiet he was keeping, but when she startles it feels genuine and broken and heartbreaking.

“You loved him,” she whispers, not turning, when she has recovered herself and leaned into his hug and still cannot meet his eyes. John nods into her shoulder, because it is true, and he has never been any good at lying.

“I love you,” he says, instead, because of all things this is true.

“I’m sorry,” says Mary, and the taut line of her back shivers like Sherlock’s voice had when he’d first tried to explain, that first night he’d come and interrupted John’s almost-proposal and been horribly and rudely _not dead_ , the tell of a person who’s hurt the one they love in a way they don’t fully understand and don’t think they’ll ever be able to fix. “I am so sorry. You don’t deserve this.”

John pulls her close against him, and wonders.

“I loved him,” he says, eventually, because he needs to say it. “But I married you. And if I had to choose, if I ever have to choose, over again, I will choose you. I would always have chosen you.”

“You should never have had to,” says Mary, and turns to face him, finally, violin sliding gently to the floor. She wraps his arms around him, still locked in his embrace, and John lets her cry into his shoulder and lets himself cry into hers and doesn’t, will not, let himself agree.

***

He kisses her twice a day, at the very least, and three times on Sundays. He never thought he’d one day be keeping a count.

***

Their child is born, and it is so small and fragile and beautiful and perfect, and it is a boy. The doctor had, apparently, made a mistake, but John cannot bear to hold it against him. Doctors do that, sometimes, after all.

They name their son William.

(It had been Mary’s idea.)

***

Mary stays home for some months after their son is born, breastfeeding and burping and changing diapers, and John likes to pretend that this all stems from an innate motherly instinct he’s always seen in her, in the way she’d held him, _before_ , hand cupping the base of his skull, lips pressed to the top of his head as they waited for the shaking to stop. This is probably true, anyway, is true enough in the way she smiles at him, radiant with a post-partum glow, and the way she smiles at their baby, long fingers caught in his tiny ones, and it makes it so much easier to pretend there isn’t some sort of penance involved.

They paint the nursery a buttery yellow. Mary does a mural on the far wall, buying twenty colours of wall paint in the tiny pots the hardware shop sells with dust on their lids for the sort of people who can’t decide what colour they want on their walls until they actually paint them and don’t have the bravery to risk a wrong decision. She paints in a forest glade, four different shades of green forming a canopy of leaves dappled with pale winter sunlight, a path leading away and off to the artificial distance, its curves and bends and directions shaded and obscured by the branches of trees, real enough to run away on. John watches her and smiles and says it’s beautiful, because it is, and inside he thinks about how his son will never know the battlefield of his city, will grow up on suburban streets and never really understand what it means to have a soldier for a father and a murderer for a mother or a madman for an honorary uncle, will only ever know doctor-housewife parents and dream of skipping through forest glades.

John tells himself his boy is lucky, and he tells himself that he is happy, and he tells himself that it doesn’t bother him that he’d never known Mary could paint.

Most of these things are true.

***

“I miss him,” says Molly Hooper, quiet but not cowed. They’re alone in the cafeteria at Bart’s, John sipping a cup of lukewarm tea, Molly tucking in to a sandwich with almost certainly exaggerated relish. They have lunch now and then, round about once a week and never regularly, have done since John had plucked up his courage and his boredom and asked for his old job back. He got it, no questions asked, and he very deliberately never questioned whether it was his impressive CV or his first-class degree or a phone call from the now-one-and-only Mr Holmes that did it. John is comfortable around Molly, which is something he used to take for granted and now doesn’t think he’ll ever fully understand, and she seems comfortable enough around him, which is something he thinks he understands even less.

“Of course,” says John, neutrally. He takes another sip. Terrible.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Molly continues, sounding almost-but-not-quite apologetic. Sympathy is something Molly does well, but so is steel. She’d gotten tired of letting others frighten her, somewhere along the line. John suspects she’d done it a long time ago, around the same time her maniac of a gay boyfriend had decided to start playing around with her arsehole of a crush. “And I’m not going to make you. But I just had to say it: I miss him.”

John sighs. He finishes his tea. It wasn’t quite what he’d wanted when he ordered it, but he’d intended to make the best of it, all the same.

“I know you do,” John says. “So do I.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I could have done something,” says Molly, and this time she does duck her head, lets the _like last time_ go unsaid. John shakes his head, slowly, touches her hand. He wishes he didn’t blame her. He really shouldn’t.

“There was nothing to be done,” he says, because at least this time it is not her fault. “This one was all on me.”

“It must have been worth it,” says Molly, smiling, soft like she usually is and a little crooked. “I don’t know what he did, and I don’t need you to tell me, but it must have been.”

“It was,” says John, and he means it, really he does.

***

He never does hear from Mycroft.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

***

“William,” sighs John, herding his little boy away from a rather heavy and precariously-stacked selection of medical texts, and reminds himself for the hundredth time this week that he really needs to clean the living room, “don’t touch that, sweetheart, that’s dangerous.”

“No,” says Mary, picking the child, who crawls really abnormally fast, off the floor, “don’t go there, that’s stairs, love.’

“Oh god,” one of them groans, and they can’t tell who, and it doesn’t really matter, “I think he’s gotten into the kitchen again,” because whenever he does that the whole place ends up covered in flour or milk or whatever it is they’ve been too scattered to remember to nail down, and John never admits that he always expects to see a little crater in the countertop after, or that he thinks the kitchen looks better, more like a crime scene, more like home.

 After the fifth month, John re-learns how to fall asleep to the sound of a million little night noises, and it’s a knowledge that is both sad and comforting, and it makes him feel like himself again in a way that he will not allow to disturb him.

Once, he wakes to a sound in the night, like he used to, before and _before_ , and finds Mary sitting on the floor of the living room, again, moonlight streaming in through the wide-open window and catching her in a web of light. It falls on her shoulders, this time, not her hair, and instead of bleaching her it illuminates her soft blue dressing-gown and lights her eyes and the edges of her smile. In her lap, in lieu of a violin, is their baby boy.

“We should have named him after someone else,” says John, from the doorway, his voice rough because it’s three in the morning and not for any other reason. “Would have saved us a world of trouble.”

Mary laughs, low and gentle, and the words hurt much less than either of them expect.

***

They don’t fight like they used to, little bickerings like couples have all the time, and then like lovers do who live together and on top of each other and forget to put the toilet seat down or to squeeze the toothpaste from the back of the tube instead of the middle or to do the laundry until one of them runs out of blouses, and, later, like a married couple who needs to pick a fight every now and then before they become disgusted with their nauseating happiness.

Now, when they fight, they fight dirty,  and she accuses him of distrusting her, of hating her, and he reminds her of all the secrets, of all the lies, of all the reasons why she has no right to demand these things that she needs, that he needs, that they promised. Now, they fight like they are going to fall apart, like they want to, like it needs to hurt because it does.

Because they love each other, they have rules. Because they love each other, they fight as little as possible, not daily or weekly or monthly or anything like regular, and they bite back the little squabbles so that the time in between these fights reminds them why they’re still trying, and they make up as quickly as possible after, hugging and crying and telling each other how much they are loved, always, forever, even when they cannot meet the other’s eyes.

Because they love each other, they never mention certain things, like how Mary’s always suspected she was acting as some kind of replacement, before and now, or like how John’s always going to believe that she’s the reason he needs anything replaced in the first place. They will never mention these things, no matter how heated the fights, no matter how badly they want to hurt, and because they love each other they do not think them except in quiet moments when they’re alone and afraid and they slam the door on these terrible thoughts, hard, and throw away the key.

Besides, these things may not even be true. Sometimes, on good days, both of them know that they aren’t, they never have been, they’ve never been more certain of anything in their lives.

On bad days, they hold on to this certainty, and to each other, and they pray.

***

When William is two, Mary says, “I’m thinking of going back to work.”

“Alright,” John says, without thinking, and doesn’t ask _what as_. He knows it’s not a fair question.

He phones Lestrade, after dinner, watching Mary bounce William on her knee, and Greg tells him that of course, he’d love to see Mary’s (fake) CV, and, yeah, there is in fact an opening for a new sergeant at his department, but she’d have to come in for evaluation and (totally unnecessary) training and maybe start as a constable, but he’ll see what he can do, and, by the way, John, they _are_ still on for this Thursday at the pub, aren’t they, usual time?

John tells him that they are, of course, thanks so much for your help, and smiles into the phone, and smiles at his wife, who has lost all the baby weight but not, presumably, the marksmanship skills, and is strong and brave and completely mad and dazzlingly beautiful. And when he gets a text from Greg, later, telling him with almost fond exasperation that some strings had, indeed, been pulled, but not by him, and could the new Police Sergeant Mary Watson please report for duty on Monday, John smiles even wider with no bitterness and more gratitude than he’d ever have expected.

Mary reports on time on Monday. She’s assigned to the unit of one Detective Inspector Sally Donovan, who greets her with an evaluative look and a smile that is mostly welcoming and wholly sincere and utterly not-smug, and John thinks that, maybe, he could forgive her someday.

He realizes, later, with a jolt like the time he and Sherlock had tried to burgle a suspect’s house and nearly collided head-on with his near-invisible electric fence, that he almost already has.    

Mary is as brilliant as a police officer as she is at almost everything else she does, and she tells him, coming home, of the places she’s run to and the people she’s chased and the suspects she’s interrogated and, on one occasion, about the time she helped Donovan dodge a bullet from a particularly deranged armed robber, and how she’d shot him in the arm to disarm him, missing the bone by millimetres and doing nearly no permanent damage. He kisses her soundly, that night, and hopes she understands that under all the inevitable jealousy there is a kernel of love and pride and wonder, and that kernel burns much brighter than the rest of it.

John takes a break from his job at the A&E, goes over to join Stamford in his teaching instead, and leaves William with Mrs Hudson during the day on the three days a week he has classes and learns how to make dinner and holds the fort when Mary goes haring out on emergencies, and on his off days and in odd moments he goes back to writing, because Sherlock had always said he was a terrible writer, but then Sherlock had always been an insufferable git.

He writes about their adventures, at first because he’d tried to keep away from them and couldn’t quite manage it, and later because he realizes it doesn’t hurt like he thought it would, like he thought it probably _should_ , and after that because someone has offered him a book contract and he likes the sound of that very much, and, finally, because he wants his son to know the man he was named for and will never have to replace.

He writes books for adults and books for children, and he never finds himself hating his students like Mike does, and he kisses his wife when she comes home, early or late or covered in blood, and tells himself there is nothing else he’d rather be doing. There really is only one, and it’s slowly becoming easier and easier to ignore.

When William is older, he will solve the cases his father has left behind, even if only in his imagination, running in his dreams, and John realizes that maybe that is enough.

***

“What are we doing?” Mary had asked, back when their child had still been inside her with the guilt that was ever-present and still fresh, like the grief that was inside him that was scabbed over and torn, abruptly, unfairly, open again. “What are we _doing_ , John? Have you any idea, at all, because I don’t.”

John had slipped his hand into hers, and squeezed. “We’re carrying on,” he’d said, and he’d meant it, at the time. At the time, it had been true.

He doesn’t say it anymore. He’s spent time as the leftovers of someone else’s war, as the left-behinds of someone else’s choices, twice over, but he’s learned that being someone else’s legacy is, in the end, a state you can grow out of.

Besides, he decides, there are better legacies to leave.

***

Sometimes, in the night, John will wake, and wonder why the sounds of the night feel so foreign some nights, why he sometimes longs to hear the pacing of a madman below him, or a gentle sonata that he’d always suspected was just and only ever for him, and why other nights he doesn’t know how he ever lived without Mary’s warm weight at his back and the soft snores of his son in his room next door.

Sometimes, John will wake, and wonder how he came to be so cursed, or how he came to be so lucky.

Sometimes, John will wake, and think about what it means to promise something, like _for better or for worse_ or _till death do us part_ or _they are my privilege_ or _I will always be there_. Sometimes he wonders what it means to keep a promise like that, and what it means to break it, what counts as a betrayal in a promise that goes as deep as this one does, right to the bone and the marrow and the root of the root and the bud of the bud, if there are any prizes for trying.

Some nights, he lies on his back and stares at the moonlight on a ceiling that somehow looks just as it did when it was the ceiling at home and home was somewhere else, and wonders how many times he’s been cheated, and how many times he’s been given more than he’d had any right to expect.

On nights like these, he closes his eyes and thinks of Mary’s hands warm on the base of his skull after the fall, of her arms strong and wrapped around his back as he’d wept, then and before, of how she’d never babied him and never pitied him and never let him go. He thinks of Sherlock, bringing him back from the dead and then doing the same for himself, of the man who’d been his colleague and his brother and his best friend, and all the things he’d sacrificed for John and for the woman that John could, on a good day, love more than anything in the world, even him.

On nights like these, he thinks of his son, slumbering in peace in the nursery with the magic path into the dark on one wall and the name of a hero on his birth certificate and his heart, and John imagines he can hear him breathing. He doesn't have to imagine he can hear the man his son will become; he already has, five years and a lifetime ago.

On nights like these, he thinks _I love you, I love you, I love you_ , once for every time he means it, and tells himself he is grateful.

On nights like these, eventually, he knows it to be true.

 


End file.
